today you’re going to segfault your compiler.
Segfaults are our friends and teachers
This afternoon, I got a segmentation fault in a Rust program, and was confused. This is Rust, I shouldn’t get segfaults! I quickly checked the couple of places I used unsafe, and they were either calling C functions (and checking the errors), or telling the compiler not to initialize some memory because I was going to write into it unconditionally before reading from it.
Falling Into The Pit of Success
Eric Lippert notes the perils of programming in C++: I often think of C++ as my own personal Pit of Despair Programming Language. Unmanaged C++ makes it so easy to fall into traps. Think buffer overruns, memory leaks, double frees, mismatch between allocator and deallocator, using freed memory, umpteen dozen
Essentials of Compilation
Compilers are notoriously difficult programs to teach and understand. Most books about compilers dedicate one chapter to each progressive stage, a structure ...
The Story of C++: The World's Most Consequential Programming Language | The Official Story
Fix your tools
Last week I had to diagnose a bug in an open source library I maintain. The issue was gnarly enough that I couldn’t find it right away, but then I thought: if I set a breakpoint here and fire up the debugger, I will likely find the root cause very soon… and then proceed to mercilessly destroy it! So I rolled up my sleeves, set the breakpoint, fired up the debugger, and… saw the program run to completion without interruptions whatsoever.
How to Write Your Own C++ Game Engine
Lately I’ve been writing a game engine in C++. I’m using it to make a little mobile game called Hop Out. Here’s a clip captured from my iPhone 6. (Unmute for …
When compilers surprise you — Matt Godbolt’s blog
Sometimes compilers can surprise and delight even a jaded old engineer like me
The cost of forsaking C
The C programming language is not trendy. The most recent edition of the canonical C text (the excitingly named The C Programming Language)…
Claude Is Not a Compiler - exe.dev blog
In early 2025, I wrote Is Claude a Compiler? At the time, my answer was: I don’t know.
kyju.org
Horribly misusing Rust features to provide provable memory safety and tracing garbage collection for pointer soup.
Modular: The Claude C Compiler: What It Reveals About the Future of Software
Compilers occupy a special place in computer science. They're a canonical course in computer science education. Building one is a rite of passage. It forces you to confront how software actually works, by examining languages, abstractions, hardware, and the boundary between human intent and machine execution.
Tree Borrows | Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages
The Rust programming language is well known for its ownership-based type system, which offers strong guarantees like memory safety and data race freedom. However, Rust also provides unsafe escape hatches, for which safety is not guaranteed automatically ...
Coroutines in C
[Coroutines trilogy: C preprocessor | C++20 native | general philosophy ]
Language Tour — Dependently-Typed BEAM Language
Dependently typed programming for the BEAM through one kernel-checked compiler pipeline.
